That's one way to look at it... Another is just the phenomena of fads. No matter how well-kept the garden of slashdot/digg/reddit/HN they all have a time horizon. Just enjoy it while it lasts.
We all have the desire to analyze the things in our life (groups of friends, clubs, companies, communities) that have died. I do it all the time. I wonder what happened to community "x" that I was a part of and really enjoyed and miss. You look around at your neighborhood or city and see permanence and figure your community must have had something wrong with it.
Of course, the barriers to entry and exit for an online community are very low. People change, the time they have available changes, their interests change, whatever. They exit the community as easily as they entered it. Soon the community dies. Your town or neighborhood isn't so easily left or entered so the stakes are much higher.
Sometimes communities just get old and people leave. Pretty soon they're gone.
When you cool something down to near absolute zero it can turn into a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose-Einstein_condensate For example at 1.7×10^-7K rbidium turns into a BEC. At 10^-8K perhaps that would turn normal matter into a BEC. Then you would have to be able to get useful information out of a state of matter where every possible value exists at once, and the tool your using to read values warms the condensate past the point of being one. Hey - I think you just invented a quantum computer. Congrats.
On a site note I think lasers are the advanced cooling system of the future!
I live in Mountain View, and the only thing I think this is missing is the outdoor activities that living in the bay offers. If you enjoy hiking checkout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevens_Creek_Reservoir You'll be able to see PA to SJ when you get up high enough.
If you dirtbike, check out met-caf or make the trek to Hollister. Totally worth it.
there is another comment that speaks to this ("it comes down to code"), but i'd just like to say - use what ever you can to get the job done, then think about porting/optimizing/frameworks...
TO the question at hand - Yes - php and sql can get the job done... i mean are you building it for 1,000 users? or 100,000? php and sql can handle both...
Code tight and code well, tell everyone else to go to hell
